We presume that you have already read the Introduction and have a Chromium repository set up as well. If you need more help setting up Chromium, here is what we did (when this guide was created the Chromium version was 47.0.2526.73).

We have decided to create a step-by-step guide to show you how to build your own browser based on the Content API. You might be familiar with our previous work on this topic. If not, you can start learning about the basics from here.

We have recently created a summarized architecture overview about Chromium. Our purpose was that everyone who is interested in this topic could see how Chromium is built together and understand how it works. You can check it out here.

Testing a web browser can be approached from several different angles. One can test performance, responsiveness, correctness of page layout or even the behavior of a web site in different user interactions.

Several months ago, a simple question was raised to us: How can one build a web browser? This was an interesting question not a trivial one to be answered in one sentence. So, at the University of Szeged we started to work on this issue to come up with a handy answer. This is how Sprocket was born. However, let us start from the beginning.

What is ASM.JS?

Now that mobile computers and cloud services become part of our lives, more and more developers see the potential of the web and online applications. ASM.JS, a strict subset of JavaScript, is a technology that provides a way to achieve near native speed in browsers, without the need of any plugin or extension. It is also possible to cross-compile C/C++ programs to it and running them directly in your browser.

In this post we will compare the JavaScript and ASM.JS performance in different browsers, trying out various kinds of web applications and benchmarks.